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Wednesday, October 23, 2013

26 of my "S" submission for the ABECEDARYFirst of all - what is a ABECEDARY? It is a book with each page representing a letter of the alphabet. The Book Arts Roundtable is my book making group in New Jersey and our collaborative this year was an ABECEDARY. I was given the letter S and I was told to design a card and make 26 copies to swap with everyone else, each one, given a specific letter. In the end we would all get a deck of cards of the entire alphabet. I decided to keep this as simple as possible. I did not want to labor at printing out all those cards, so much can go wrong when you are printed something out on a computer, so I wanted to do something artful.

So One afternoon I "painted" S curves with sumi ink. After painting the image I waited 5-10 seconds and washed it off in the sink. Sumi has lacquer in it and some of the edges dry black, while other parts wash off and just leaves gray. This was a lot of fun! I was playing music and found that I got bolder in my brush strokes when some Jazz came on.

But what to do on teh back side. It was pouring rain one day and I lit a candle and got the idea to burn the edges. This was a lot of fun and I just loved the edges! In fact, I got so into it, I scorched or sooted up the backs!

The picutre above is all of my 26 cards feathered out to see all the edges. This was photo'd before I handed them out.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

I'm taking an on-line composition class titled Dynamic Composition. The first assignment was to use a very restricted color way and only to use squares and rectangles. I went to a Joseph Albers book for inspiration and basically copied 4 of his designs. The teach said - keep trying. I liked this one in its simplicity. So many of the other students glommed on so many elements - I thought mine was pretty pure!

Monday, October 21, 2013

It's been awhile. Vacation, then my wet studio in the basement has been rehabbed. It was very disruptive, but it looks great now. I am still waiting for two tables to be made, but I do have a large table that I can use for now.

Omega

I created this collage in a meeting with my fellow collage makers. We were given the task of using text. Rather than starting with black text on white - I went with white text on black.

This next collage was much bigger - but somehow it created itself. I love to squint my eyes and see the pattern I have created using the light and dark areas.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

I do try to use my own photographs in digital collage and I recall taking lots of shots of antique trains, for some reason I love them, but its probably more about the shape of the train tracks vanishing in the distance. The overlay of words is Billy Collin's poem "The Last Cigarette". I always interpreted the cigarette as fuel to creativity therefore the train is travelling "into" the old typewriter (my Mother in Law's).